Category: Data

Yeah, no idea. On a historical basis, there’s no way to say what will happen on Tuesday. The people all had a well-rated best performance (Back Home for Nick, My Immortal for Jax, and Earned It for Clark), though Jax was the highest-rated.

There have been some irregularities on the Votefair poll (the runner, Mr. Fobes, says that a Canadian was spamming his site with votes). That being said, Votefair isn’t particularly predictive at this point anyway. But for what it’s worth, Nick is the lowest rated on that service by a comfortable margin. The values printed above are the values from today, normalized.

If you want my subjective opinion, Clark and Jax nudge out Nick for a finale.

Of the three remaining contestants, Twitter has the most negative view of Clark, with Nick in close second:

Jax is well ahead of the others on Twitter. Note that Bing Predicts (which has access to the most actual data by a mile) said Jax was in danger tonight. They have not seen fit to present the reasoning behind that.

Rayvon is heavily favored to go home. More than 7 points outside the margin of error. It would be a shocker if he weren’t eliminated.

Nick has sort of risen to the front of the pack, but not by much. Nobody touches Clark on Votefair (but then again, neither did anyone get very close to Angie Miller, third place in S13 … that index is not particularly predictive at this point).

Rayvon has, for the first time since the Top 11, the highest negative sentiment on Twitter:

Unlike last week, there’s plenty of granularity here. Rayvon is least likely to be safe. Not outside the margin-of-error, though.

So look: I know that some people don’t like ignoring Votefair. It seems like, if that many people are voting for one person, how can you ignore it? But numbers don’t lie. Even in the old model, the one that had Dialidol, Votefair was bottomed out at 20% strength at this point in the contest. And now, without that history to calibrate by, we have no idea how it affects the outcome, but we know it’s probably very little. As far as the data for rounds with multiple performances, there is no statistically significant effect of Votefair. If it does matter, it’s impossible to say by how much. So, just like last week, take the above numbers for what they’re worth, derived from considering solely how many times a contestant was in the bottom group and the highest WNTS rating of the week.

While Clark clearly has his fans, people on Twitter are a bit more negative on him than the others. The same is true of Tyanna.

Rayvon, still going strong, has the second-highest number of positives. Note that I believe this week was the last week with the Twitter save. Valar morghulis.

To be quite honest, my interest in this season is flagging. Couple this with the inherent difficulty in modeling Idol in a post-DialIdol age and, well, the forecast has a ton of uncertainty. Continue reading

Final update: Joey sticks at down 7 points from last week, but she’s still 4th most popular. Nevertheless, she falls out of safe territory. Nick falls a little, and overtakes Rayvon as the least safe (but not by much).

Update 2: Rayvon falls as Jax rises. Still no confident picks, but Rayvon is now the least safe.

Update: new numbers. Also, the fit in the Top 7 is somewhat better using data the Top 10 to the Top 6. In that case, gender becomes less significant, as does performance order. Jax rises one slot, as does Quentin, whose numbers were lagging a bit. Joey’s popularity is still down 7 points from last week, and Tyanna’s 6 points up.

Green = projected safe, yellow = too close to call

Hear me out.

First of all, nobody is even close to being called in the bottom 2 outside the margin of error. The model is not projecting Jax is in the bottom 2. Nope.

However.

Historically speaking, Jax is not in good territory. First, she is a woman, and AI voters just don’t seem to like those. Her performance of Poker Face was not particularly well received (I thought it was marginally better than the rest of the internet did). And while she’s fairly popular on Votefair, she isn’t overwhelmingly so. She trails Joey, for instance.

What tips the scales somewhat against Jax is that she went first, which ain’t the best place to be. Now, you could argue, and it’s not necessarily wrong, that performance order isn’t as important now that you can vote right away on your smart phone. Ok, sure. But, I know that I wait til the end of the show, and that means other people might too. And they might forget to vote for Jax. (Full Disclosure: Since the Top 12, I have only voted for Joey.)

Twitter isn’t overwhelmingly positive on Jax either, to be honest:

Nick has more negatives than Jax. But Jax has almost as many as the controversial Joey Cook.

In any case, nearly equally likely to be in the bottom 2 (yet again) is Rayvon. He’s got a great Twitter organization pulling for him, and both weeks they have made #SaveRayvon a trending hashtag. That’s something of a pickle for the Idol producers: what if the Idol save pits Rayvon as a weekly gladiator against another contestant, and like Maximus he consistently comes out ahead? Now that would be entertaining.

Things aren’t great for Quentin, although he is still better than fair to be safe. Clark, Tyanna, and Joey are all projected safe for now.